afongen

Dr. Ernesto Illy, of Italy’s Illycaffe, is on the November 3 broadcast of The Splendid Table, talking about espresso (what else?). This man is a delight to listen to.

And hey, Bill Waddington is on the October 27 show, sharing some delightful scented teas. Bill’s the owner of my favorite local tea shop, TeaSource, and appears regularly on the show.

I like peer-to-peer. The architecture appeals to me, I’m excited about a lot of the P2P apps that are out there…it’s just plain fun and exciting stuff, especially once you peel away all the layers of marketing hype. I’m perversely delighted at how P2P is sneaking into the office under IT departments’ noses. However at the same time, working within an IT department — in an academic environment, no less — I see the sort of problems that P2P filesharing apps can pose: bandwidth and legal issues, to start with. When an entire campus’s bandwidth is sucked up by a student trafficking in porn or illegal MP3s, well it’s a problem. For the most part, I tend to skirt around the issue; I rarely have to deal with it directly (I’m a web guy, not a WAN guy), and anyway part of me is going “yay P2P!” I mean, that student’s probably going to suck up bandwidth regardless of architecture, right?

Andy Oram, editor of O’Reilly’s Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, recently gave a speech to about Peer-to-Peer for Academia, in which he tries to downplay the negative aspects of P2P and encourages academia to experiment with P2P to take advantage of what it has to offer. Worth a read.

What’s Lost When a Language Dies?

Oh, that’s too funny. Workopolis, a Canadian job site, has a link to a “boss panic button” in their menu bar.

Good article in New York Times about Illy: Discovering La Dolce Vita in a Cup. Registration required, more than likely.

Illycaffe is one of Italy’s premier espresso roasters. I’ve tasted some of their stuff, it is indeed superb. It surprises me to read that they eschew robusta (dismissed as “truck-tire consommé”) in their blend. To my understanding, most Italian roasters prefer a little robusta in their cup, and I’m quite fond of the American roasters here who use a bit in their espressos (I’m convinced that Maravonda does, for instance, and they’re one of my favorite espresso roasters). It’s obviously quite possible to produce a wonderful espresso with only arabica, though.

I’d also like to emphasize that contrary to those who may claim otherwise, it’s perfectly possible to find exquisite espresso blends outside Italy. In fact, you’re often better off buying a locally roasted blend instead of a can of Italian espresso.

The 2001 Mars Odyssey has entered orbit around Mars. I don’t spend nearly enough time on NASA web sites. They do some of the most amazing educational work.

Three professors and a student are suing St. Cloud State over treatment of Jews. Y’know, this doesn’t surprise me one bit. There are some truly excellent people working at SCSU who would never tolerate this sort of racist, anti-Semitic BS, but my experience with St. Cloud in general and stories I’ve heard from those excellent people do little to discourage me from believing the allegations in the lawsuit.

Tuesday night I went to a class at the TeaSource, our local tea shop. Gong fu is a Chinese way of preparing, drinking, enjoying, and experiencing tea. While discussing the aroma of one of the teas we were trying, I commented that I’d pretty much shot my nose when I was a coffee roaster. Spend several years inhaling hot smoke through your nose and you’ll do the same.

This led to the surprised question of how I got from coffee to tea. “It’s the natural evolution upwards,” the shop owner joked. This isn’t the first time I’ve had that question, though, and it exposes an attitude that usually surprises me. It also begs an explanation. So here goes.

When I drink tea, I drink it with the same mindfulness that is emphasized in gong fu. Carefully, attentively, I prepare the water, the tea, the infusion. Tea is an opportunity to pause and reflect. I focus on the tea, on friends around the table, on this moment in time. In some ways, when I’m in a mystical frame of mind, it’s an act of devotion, a prayer. This is one of the things that first drew me to tea: its subtle flavors and need for careful attention in preparation are an occasion to practice the mindfulness I seek in my daily life. When I’m being social (yes, this happens from time to time) tea’s relative ease of preparation facilitates rather than impedes conversation. When I’m facing a particularly stressful time, I look forward to its soothing warmth.

I feel the same way about coffee. I don’t drink coffee just for a caffeine fix — I have other ways of getting that. I like coffee for many of the same reasons I enjoy tea: it offers a withdrawal into a moment in time, an opportunity to savor its subtle flavors. Make no mistake: coffee may by and large taste a lot stronger than tea, but its flavors can be just as refined and elusive as tea’s. Especially once you move into the world of espresso, where coffee truly becomes a cuisine.

That’s something that surprises people who align themselves with one camp or another. Coffee people usually can’t handle the mild flavors of many teas, especially greens or whites. Tea people often can’t stand coffee’s strong flavor, so don’t take the time to delve into its subtleties. The thing is, though, that coffee and tea share a whole lot more than people usually think, and it’s what they share that I love about them both.

Practical Kabbalah.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s comments on the SSSCA, including information about what you can do.

Ten years ago or so, I was really active on a local BBS called The Dark Knight’s Table. As I recall, Erik Jacobson, TDKT’s sysop had something to do with the Electronic Freedom Foundation — maybe something in his sigfile or on the BBS somewhere. Clueless me, I was intrigued but never dug too deep. Now it seems that every time I turn around I see the EFF in the news, fighting the good fight.

I see now that I should have paid more attention to what Erik had to teach me in his self-effacing way. Now that I think about it, he was the one who introduced me to UNIX.